My Father's House, page 1
Dedalus Europe
General Editor: Timothy Lane
MY FATHER’S HOUSE
Support for the translation of this book was provided by Acción Cultural Española, AC/E.
Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited
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ISBN printed book 978 1 915568 08 3
ISBN ebook 978 1 915568 09 0
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First published in Spain in 2020
First published by Dedalus in 2023
La casa del padre copyright Karmele Jaio 2020
Published by special arrangement with the Ella Sher Literary Agency
Translation copyright © Margaret Jull Costa & Sophie Hughes 2023
The right of Karmele Jaio to be identified as the author and Margaret Jull Costa & Sophie Hughes as the translators of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Elcograf S.p.A.
Typeset by Marie Lane
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A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.
THE AUTHOR
Karmele Jaio writes in Basque and translates her own novels into Spanish. She has written three books of short stories, one of poetry and three novels. This is the second of her novels to be translated into English. Her first novel Her Mother’s Hands brought her several prizes and was adapted for the cinema. My Father’s House was awarded the Premio Euskadi de Literatura and was voted the Best Book written in Basque in 2019. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, including Best European Fiction and The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories.
THE TRANSLATORS
MARGARET JULL COSTA
Margaret Jull Costa has worked as a translator for over thirty years, translating the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, among them novelists: Javier Marías, José Saramago, and Eça de Queiroz, and poets: Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and Ana Luísa Amaral. Her work has brought her many prizes, among them the 2008 Pen Book-of-the Month-Club Translation Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Maias by Eça de Queiroz. In 2014, she was awarded an OBE for services to literature.
SOPHIE HUGHES
Sophie Hughes is the translator of over twenty books from Spanish, by Spanish and Latin American writers including Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zerán, José Revueltas, and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has been nominated for the International Booker Prize four times, and in 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize for Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor.
For Iñigo Muguruza
For all new men
“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss — you can’t do it alone.”
John Cheever
Thank you for being by my side while I was writing this book.
Contents
ISMAEL
1 From up on the top of the hill
2 Trapped in another time
3 Old nightmares
4 I’ll leave you to write in peace
JASONE
5 The sound of a sliding door opening
6 I’m here, had you forgotten about me?
ISMAEL
7 This is a war
8 The good old songs
9 You could take Dad home with you
10 The best lies are also the briefest
JASONE
11 I can feel your touch
LIBE
12 The age-old battle
ISMAEL
13 It wasn’t me
14 The coins
15 A perspex door
16 He’s just not a hunter
17 A stranger
JASONE
18 Fear is a difficult balancing act
LIBE
19 You’re here
ISMAEL
20 Dad frightens me
21 Arconada, I’m supporting him
22 It’s not just his lip that’s crooked
23 Come on, if you’ve got the balls
JASONE
24 You’re going to have to help me…
25 Back to the sliding door
ISMAEL
26 Like scraps of scorched paper floating to the ground
27 The pearl necklace
28 The great mystery
29 The crossword
30 It’s no longer your voice
LIBE
31 Take a step back and start again
JASONE
32 It isn’t that I fancied Jauregi, I wanted to be Jauregi
ISMAEL
33 Another sleight of hand
34 And the rest of the flock will follow behind you
ISMAEL
1
From up on the top of the hill
Gunshots in the hills. You hear them again from where you are, up high. You know, though, that the shots aren’t coming from the surrounding trees, but from inside you. Your body is just another part of the greenery. How many empty cartridges must get lost in the undergrowth, like little hearts that slowly corrode over time and yet beat on, and on, and on…
Gunshots in the hills. You’ve heard them again, from up high. And you can see the cartridges as clearly as if you were holding them in your hand. Trust cartridges, made in Eibar. Your father’s watchful gaze as he checks to see if you’ve loaded them into the shotgun correctly. Red or green, with a gold base, and packed with pellets. The pellets swiftly expand when they pierce the flesh, like some sort of evil spermatozoa. Those stupid cartridges go flying into the bushes and there’s no way to retrieve them. Not that anyone really tries. When all’s said and done, they’re just empty casings. Nobody thinks about how they continue beating and firing — bang, bang, bang — however rusty, however old.
You’ve reached the top, panting hard, having raced out of your study, leaving the computer on, and possibly also the hall light. You left without really knowing where you were going, as urgently as a diver furiously swimming up to the surface for air. Propelled more by angst than by the strong southerly wind. A familiar feeling that came back to you at your computer when you remembered yesterday’s nightmarish news about the girl found in the woods.
The news about the girl who was raped and abandoned up in the hills. Some hunters found her, too late. It turned your stomach, you can’t get it out of your head, it’s like what happened in Pamplona all over again, and you really didn’t need that. The last straw. What a hackneyed phrase, another tired cliché. No, seriously, you really can’t write any more. Your head is one big mess. One day they’ll finally find something there, a malignant tumour that prevents you from thinking. That prevents you from writing.
The news about the girl who was raped and abandoned in the woods. You’re not sure if it’s affected you more because you fear for your daughters — especially now you know that Eider was in Pamplona the night of the tragedy — or because of where it took place. Out in the wild, in the hills, a landscape that still tears at your skin like brambles, a landscape that has haunted your dreams since you were a boy.
And now here, at the top of Olarizu, a brisk forty-minute walk from your house, you ask yourself why your feet have carried you out into the woods. You wonder why the angst you feel has driven you to this precise spot, to the very epicentre of your fears.
You gaze down at the city from above, your thinning hair fluttering about your forehead. Up here, you’ve finally been able to take a deep breath and calm down a little. There’s always something so calming about being up above it all.
You haven’t been here since you were a kid. Your father brought you once or twice, soon after you moved to Vitoria, just as he used to take you to Kalamua or Ixua when you lived in Eibar, only without the shotgun. And yet the setting now fills your head with the sound of gunshots. Bang, bang, bang. Gunshots in the hills. Gunshots and dogs barking. For you, there is no more terrifying combination of sounds.
You look at the city that welcomed you when you were fifteen. A city that has grown with you, that has expanded like an ink blot on a piece of paper, losing intensity as the stain widens and spreads. It took you a moment to pinpoint the roof of your parents’ apartment building. The Church of San Pedro helped you to place it. They’ve been living in that apartment since the move from Eibar. Like their fellow residents, who also came from elsewhere: Zamora, Cáceres… In many cases, those neighbours would spend their summers back in their home towns. You remember months of empty apartments, lowered blinds, deserted stairwells. The coolness of the hallway compared to the desert heat of the street. Cold landings and scorching patios. Those intense August contrasts.
At this hour, your mother will be mopping the kitchen floor, as she has done for the last fifty years, from left to
To the right of your parents’ home is the bell tower of the Church of San Miguel. You lived near there for years, in the old part of town, with Jasone and the girls. But in among that compact jumble of houses, you haven’t been able to pinpoint the one that used to be yours. Just as you can’t see your daughters either. They’ve already left the scene, flown the nest. They no longer need your protection. They move in and out of sight like those flocks of birds you often watch in the afternoon from your study window, making shapes and patterns in the sky only to immediately unmake them again.
Your current house, the one where you and Jasone now live just the two of you, albeit with two spare bedrooms for your daughters’ comings and goings, is easy to spot. It’s in one of the residential areas in the south of the city, where the buildings are more spread out. You can even see the terrace your study looks out on. The window from which you’ve observed the world in recent years. On the other side of that window is your computer, your dried-up cup of coffee on the desk, your fears, your post-it notes, your paper clips, your slippers beside the chair, your nightmares, your books, your notepads, your world. There is your novel, the one you’ve been trying to write for the last two years. There is your secret. A novel that isn’t progressing, a creative drought, a classic case of writer’s block. Never a truer word spoken. Yet another cliché.
Just like every sentence you write. Over the last two years, your words have created nothing but cardboard scenery for a stage set. But how to create a really believable set for a world you’ve always kept well away from in real life. You’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve regretted your decision to try and describe the corrosive political atmosphere of the Basque Country in the 1980s. Putting the political conflict at the centre of your work was a disastrous idea. If it hadn’t been for Vidarte’s review of your last book, you might never have got yourself into this mess. And if it hadn’t been for the offer you received to have your next work published in Spanish translation, you might not have embarked on a history of that time of “Si vis pacem, para bellum” — “If you want peace, prepare for war” — which was your sister’s mantra. You thought the publisher would like that authentic touch, an insider’s view of the Basque conflict, but you’ve regretted it ever since. Over the last two years, you’ve questioned every single line you’ve written; not a word of it rings true, because you didn’t live through those years the way your sister did, ending up getting arrested, or like Jauregi or countless others. You always ran away from political commitment, from activism; you ran away from the first sign of pain or risk and kept the conflict at arm’s length. So how are you supposed to write about it now, if you can’t find even fragments of truth in either your hands or your memory.
You can see your study window and it seems so small… Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps that’s the reason all your ideas have dried up in recent years. You’re looking at reality from too far away. You can’t see anything from there, detached from the world. Vidarte was right all along. In his review, he wrote that your characters felt like extra-terrestrial beings, that your novel didn’t make a single reference to the world in which they live, to the social or political context… He said you never let your characters out in the street, that you kept them locked indoors, between four walls, debating among themselves. But he also said that you’d failed to do even that properly, because you watched them from afar, as if you were afraid to enter their thoughts, their nightmares. In your novel there was no engagement with either the setting or your characters’ inner lives. And without any real engagement with the truth, there can be no art. That’s what the critic Vidarte wrote about your last novel, along with a few other equally charming comments. And over these last two years you haven’t been able to shake off the image of him hovering over your study day and night, calling you an extra-terrestrial. You’re an extra-terrestrial, Alberdi.
Perhaps that’s the problem. In this new novel, you’ve tried to get close to the real world, but it isn’t easy; whenever you get too close, you take fright — as you did when you heard about that poor girl — and you scurry back to the refuge of your study. It’s not easy engaging fully with what’s happening in the world, or with the people in it, if you never leave your study from whose window you see only your own nightmares and the geraniums on the balcony that Jasone has been neglecting lately.
You see drought. You see darkness.
Perhaps it’s the darkness that has finally driven you up this hill. Yes here. Perhaps it’s the darkness that has finally propelled you into the light.
2
Trapped in another time
You ate your breakfast staring at the filter coffee machine. For years you’ve eaten breakfast sitting opposite the same bloody thing. Jasone has told you countless times that you need to change it, that it doesn’t go with the new kitchen, which, with its minimalist furniture and metallic finishes, looks more like a spaceship than a kitchen. The old coffee maker is out of place. At the very least you should buy yourselves one that uses capsules. But you’re adamant that no other machine makes coffee as good as this. Even so, for some reason, ever since you changed house and kitchen, you’ve found that coffee machine somehow discomfiting, as if it were a reflection of you, as if you, too, were out of place, outmoded, out of keeping.
When Jasone goes off to work at the library and you’re left on your own in the house, you feel the machine’s presence even more strongly. The slow rhythm of the coffee as it drips into the glass jug couldn’t be more different from the speed of the news headlines scrolling across the bottom of the screen of the TV you always have on in the background over breakfast each morning: Donald Trump, Aleppo, Lesbos, the Dow Jones, oceans of plastic… No, those news stories are from another planet. Out there, everything moves very fast. Inside, it’s just you and the electric coffee machine, trapped in another time. Drip drip dripping, gradually being drained of substance.
For a long time now you’ve watched only foreign channels: CNN, CBS… It calms you down. The bombs explode somewhere far away. Almost as far away as the bombs in the story you’re failing to write. News of rapes that have taken place locally never seem to filter through to those channels. They’re never going to tell you about how, in the early hours of that morning, a girl was raped in the very town where your youngest daughter spent the night. Jasone phoned you the second she heard the news.
‘I’ve been calling her, but there’s no answer,’ she said in an anguished voice. ‘I think she’s got her phone switched off.’
You instantly regretted having given Eider permission to go to Pamplona.
‘All of my friends are going, Dad.’
You can’t think how it even occurred to you to let her go. She’s only seventeen.
When, after one very long hour, your daughter finally called her mother — ‘What’s the big deal, my phone died, chill out’ — you felt as if you were deflating, as if all the air you’d been holding in were escaping through your mouth. A very long hour. An hour-long rape. Your daughter’s rape. You experienced it as if it had really happened, and since then you’ve felt as if an alarm were going off inside you, as if the mere mention of a man abusing a woman, raping her, murdering her, inflicted a deep wound on you. Now, as when you first heard the news of that girl who was raped and abandoned in the hills (the way someone might toss away their empty cartridges), you feel afraid, terribly afraid for what could happen to your daughters. But your fear is all mixed up with a feeling of guilt, although you can’t quite put your finger on where it’s coming from. Or perhaps you can, perhaps all Jasone’s remarks since she set up her feminist book club — all her ‘this is a war’, and ‘they’re killing us’ — have left their mark on you. That way of talking about men as if they were all the same. Ever since that awful morning after the San Fermín festivities, you’ve been paralysed by this mixture of fear and guilt. You’ve regressed to being the little boy who used to have nightmares about the woods, about the dogs’ barking during the frantic, agonising search for your cousin Aitor. In those dreams, too, the fear was always tinged with guilt.
